Personal Blog Income

Sooner or later blogging your going to find that the real world is going to cause pressure and not leave you enough time to blog. Here are some tips that may improve your productivity:

1.Identify your time stealers If you can identify what is taking so much of your time away from what you should be dealing, then you can take steps to minimize their effects on your time

2.Learn to say no. They can be time stealers or it can be something else. But sometimes no matter what everything is not possible and you have to learn to say NO before you end up in over your head drowning in the tasks at hand

3.Create a daily schedule of what needs to be done. It can in itself serve as a time saver as when you finish tasks and need to move to the next one there is no thinking about what needs to be done next. Achieving your goals on your schedule can in itself be motivating and encouraging to get the other tasks done

4.Learn to prioritize. Its all well and good to have your daily schedule but you also need to prioritize that list to get the most important things done and posted.

5.Don’t be a perfectionist. Making everything completely perfect is admirable but sometimes the quest for perfection can take more time than the value that you gain from making it perfect. Sometimes good is good enough

6.Schedule burst time. Burst time is a time that you can set aside free from other distractions and just work on something, nothing else. Perhaps it means going somewhere where you will not be distracted or interrupted or it might be as simple as taking the phone off the hook, closing email or the messenger program.

7.Combine Several Activities. If you can combine several activities at the same time as it can be a more efficient use of your time than trying to fit everything in one after the other. It might be listening to that podcast while you work or for me I catch up with dvds i haven’t otherwise. I used to laugh at the guy that got on the bus at the start of the route and opened his laptop straight away and went to work, now i realize that he was just applying time management principals to his bus ride.

8.Schedule Rewards. All work and no play makes you a dull blogger. Blogging like everything else can be hard work and for motivation and incentives its important to set yourself time off to unplug for a while or to get that item that you have been wanting.

9.Evaulate After you have been trying to manage your time for a while, evaluate how you are going, what is still distracting you and how you can improve things. The time taken to evaluate can be time well worth spending.

Whilst i have written this orientated towards bloggers, at the end of the day you can apply time management principals like these to just about any part of life to get the most out of everything.

Good luck managing your time.

This follows on from my morning post about Expectations and i thought it would be great to highlight some of the characteristics of successful bloggers who have made it “all the way” and are now successful.

I recently read an interesting article How to Be a Successful Blogger: Learning From the Best on Online Public Relations that discussed what successful bloggers had in common and the receipe for success as a blogger and it boiled down to the following criteria:

• Passion
• Listen
• Dialogue
• Play Fair
• Become the Resource
• Network
• Business

I like it, its certainly got all the elements of what makes a great blogger. The only thing that i think might be missing is i would suggest drive or persistence. No one gets to the top overnight and its only through a whole lot of hard work that they make it.

Next week I am going to start to introduce you to the first steps of monetizing your blogs and before I do that I wanted to take the time to talk about expectations. By now you would have read that there are people who quit their jobs to blog full time and they have bought cars, houses, holidays, put their kids through college and more. And chances are you have already thought about quitting that job yourself. You will have seen ads for get rich schemes where for one low price you can make big dollars with an exclusive plan, probably marketed along the lines of “The Shocking Truth they didn’t want you to know”

STOP!!!!

Before you spend that $19.95, $99.95 or tell the boss where to put the job I need to tell you the truth. There is no quick way to blogging riches. To make money blogging takes time, effort and perseverance despite what the flash marketing tells you. With many of those marketing schemes the only person getting rich is the author with your hard earned money.

Ready to switch off in disgust? Don’t because now its time for the good news. From day one blogging you can start to earn money from your blog and over time the money that you can earn will increase. If you’re skilled, hard working and lucky then you may be one of the relative few that do get to make blogging a full time job but for the rest of us, you can still make more than loose change from your blogs but you need to set realistic expectations.

So what are realistic expectations?

You need to set yourself reasonable goals. When I start a new blog there is a certain amount of outlay before the first entry is ever posted. There is the hosting costs, cost of the domain name(s), cost in my time and effort to get the ready to post in. And then there is the time spent researching and writing your posts. It all comes at a cost and while you are outlaying the cash, its not going to come back right away.

When I start a new blog to keep my expectations realistic is to set goals to achieve that are both obtainable and realistic. To use this blog as an example I have set the following goals

• 90 posts in 90 days

• Break even on costs by 120 days

• Make a thousand dollars in the first year of operation from this blog.

Time will tell how successful I am with this goals but none of them is impossible to achieve. Its even possible that I may succeed far more than the goals that I have set. So using my goals I have realistic expectations as there is nothing worse for motivation than setting goals that are too high and failing to achieve them in spectacular fashion.

Of course there is another side to setting goals and that is that it can also highlight what is not working and what could or should be working better. It gives you the chance to change things or even throw out old ideas and start with new ones.

I hope that this has given you a little bit of food for thought. Coming up next for those that still think they have what it takes to make it all the way to full time blogger is the characteristics of successful bloggers. How did they get where they did?

In the meantime, answer me this. What are your goals from blogging and what is the plan to get there? I look forward to reading some of your answers!

Ok so you have chosen that perfect theme for your blog and have it set up on your blog and now i am going to say one thing, STOP! At least until you read this.

A common mistake with a new blog is that you find all these things that you can add into your blog that you believe are cool and interesting. They can include the popular MyBlogLog list of the latest visitors, tweets from your tweeter account, where your visitors come from, the list goes on. Now you while you may think these are truly gods gift to bloggers but it can be doing something completely different:

Are your cool things slowing down your blog’s loading time

In these days of broadband internet, loading time isn’t quite the issue that it once was. But there are still people out there that are on dial up that don’t want to wait for your blog and its “cool stuff”. And the same is true as well for broadband users, if your blog takes more than a few seconds to load, their attention may wander and they may just visit the next place on their list.

What kind of Impression is it giving.

Another problem that can occur in addition to slow loading time is the impression it can give. If your sidebar is cluttered with different things then it is going to look exactly that, cluttered. Its going to distract the visitor from what you want then to read, your content.

What should you do

Those that have served in any army would have probably heard the expression “lean green fighting machine” and you want to create the same thing with your blog. You want it to be a lean blogging machine. A faster, leaner blog with less distractios is going to minimise the distractions that can happen and let visitors focus on why they are really there, your content.

Good luck with your new lean blogging machine!

Update: Seems i am not the only one thinking this. Andy Wibbels is Loofahing blog sidebars along the same lines as me

So you have chosen a blog platform, found a good web host and registered a domain name for your blog. Things are going great but before you go too much further, what about security on your blog?

Chances are right now your saying but i have security, I have my login and my password so i am set. Its not going to happen to me. Maybe, maybe not.

How you feeling now? Yeah its something to worry about and let me assure you. There are people out there that do want to hack your blog right now. More still if your blog is a hit and takes off.

The good news is that there are some simple strategies you can adopt to reduce the chances of your blog being hacked and some of the best tips i found were in the Problogger article Blog Security - Tips on Keeping Your Blog from being Hacked which were:

1. Update your Blog Software
2. Keep an Eye on Your Dead Blogs
3. Backup your blog
4. Protect Your Password (includes basic password strategies)
5. Choose your Host Carefully.

I would suggest that you also follow common sense computing tips as well which include:

1. Use a Firewall
2. Update Your Computer
3. Use Up to date antivirus software
4. Use Up to date antispyware
5. Don’t open files from strangers
6. If you use Wireless computer networking then practice safe practices

There is no magic bullet to make your blog or computer 100% safe but if you take some precautions then the chances of it being your blog are reduced.

What about Hosted Blogs?

Its tempting to say if your blog is hosted on one of the Hosted Blog Providers like blogger or typepad to say that i am alright, its all taken care of. The answer to that is yes and no. The provider does take care of a lot of the behind the scenes stuff including version upgrades and other steps to reduce the chance of hacking. But if your blog gets hacked then it is still your problem because your blog is down. They may or may not be able to restore your content. With good security

* I would also like to add the disclaimer that i am not a computer security professional. If you have serious concerns then consult a computer security professional or your web host.